Humans
by AlienZombies
Summary: When there is nothing else, there are far worse monsters.


I debated whether or not to upload this and then I figured just why not. It's not quite like anything else I've written, so I'm not sure of it. I was just doing a writing warmup and this was what came out of it. But you know, I guess it's worth a shot. Let me know what you think, please! I'd be super thankful.

**Human**

"Another one," Ellis growled. He leveled his shotgun and took aim.

But something wasn't right about it – I couldn't quite place why. Squinting, I took in the profile of the man's shoulders, how they were parallel with the earth, the way he didn't wander or hunch. He had a knapsack on his back and a grocery cart filled with an assortment of things, little things. He turned his face sideways and the sun caught his full face, and I saw he had a cigarette still burning between his lips.

"Wait," I said, too late. Ellis pulled the trigger, jerking at the sound of my voice, and the shot missed, chipping the cement five feet from the stranger's sneakers.

The stranger in the distance yelped and then let out a long, pealing laugh. It was a laugh I was familiar with, a sound just a bit too similar to a scream. He was on the verge of a breakdown.

"Hey, folks!" he crowed at us. "Lookee hear, we got a passel of 'em! Git on down here, say hello!"

Ellis's face went cheesy and white, and his mouth popped open and then snapped shut. He lowered his gun. The bruises under his eyes stood out, purple smudges like war paint. "Holy shit," he whispered. "I pert near almost killed him."

"Hello!" Rochelle called back to the stranger. She trotted up ahead of us. "Well, I'll be damned!"

It was strange, in a way, to see another living person. We'd run into a few on our journey – probably there was a good ten percent of any given population still immune. But most of those people had been on the verge of death, and still more ran from us the moment they saw us. We'd been running into more and more once we realized that there would be no salvation – the army was wiping out the infection with fire, and evacuation was a hopeless and dangerous endeavor. So we moved on.

Ellis looked at me, but I couldn't think of anything to say to him so I just started walking after Rochelle, picking up the pace. Making a low whimpering noise, Ellis followed. He kept on my heels.

As we came near, I realized that the man's shopping cart was filled with wallets, toothbrushes, and squirt guns. There was an open box of Cheez-Its in the child seat, and as the stranger spoke with us he ate out of that box, one little square at a time, with a constantness that was almost mechanical.

"Where you folks from?" he chattered. "You don't sound like you're from Atlanta, cutie."

Rochelle wrinkled her nose in an obvious attempt to keep back some biting comment. "I'm from Ohio," she said, and thumbed towards Ellis and myself. "Ellis here, with the hat –"

"Hey," Ellis greeted. He couldn't quite work up a smile.

" – he's from Georgia, too. Nick, here, won't say."

I didn't like this guy. He smelled very strongly of aftershave, and something a little riper underneath, like infection and blood. But he looked clean, except for smudges of blood around his chin and hands, but we all looked like hell anyway. He was slim-shouldered and had that fey excitability that reminded me of a used car salesman or a boy scout club leader. His hair was salt-and-pepper, placing him around my age, his hairline thinning. His teeth were big and slightly yellow from smoking, and his pants were currently undone.

"Well, hey there, Nick and Ellis," the stranger said around his Cheez-It. He raked his eyes over Ellis with a thoroughness that suggested he was storing away some inappropriate information. Ellis shifted uncomfortably under the scrutiny. "My name is Barry Croft. Ain't it nice, with all these folk missin'?"

Rochelle's eyes went wide but she said nothing. Ellis gripped his gun more tightly.

Croft carried on. "Well, I mean, there are some nasty little sonsabitches round – those, whatchamacallins, those um… Anyways, those ones with the tongues. Holee-shit. But I figure, you know, if you keep to the middle of the street and the convenience stores they ain't too much of a bother. You just got to watch for those little noisemakers, what cause those bitches don't like nothin' too loud, now, do they? Anyway, I'm mostly safe all right, what cause most of them are dyin' of starvation now, or somethin, ain't it. That's what I got this bess for." He patted the hood of a nearby truck affectionately. The thing was blood-coated.

"What model is it?" Ellis asked, unable to keep the fondness out of his voice. He liked to talk cars.

"Shit if I know. She purrs like a bee-yoot, though. And she got a nice set of springs, rollin' right over all sorts of shit, now. Check out my hood ornament. Come 'ere."

At this point, we had been at oblique angles with the car, with the stranger standing by its front bumper, the hood obscured. Now, he swept aside, nudging his odd shopping cart out of the way with a feminine bump of his hips. Rochelle stepped around first and made a sound like a bird cawing, and I chanced a look.

"Oh, Lord," Ellis murmured, and put a hand over his mouth.

There was a woman on the hood of his car, clearly infected but only recently dead. Her skirt was hiked up around her waist and she had no underwear to speak of. There was a gaping wound in her neck, clotted with semi-fresh blood, and when Croft patted her naked thigh good-naturedly like he had done to the hood of his car, her head rolled slightly and the gash flexed and gapped like a skinless mouth. Her hair, which had once been blond but was now bloodsoaked and dirty to the point of near-blackness, was fanned out in mats around her staring, blemished face. The skin around her teeth was black and partially corroded away. A fly landed on her filmy white eye and then promptly took off again.

"Found this one just in that there bar," Croft said conversationally, pointing to a nearby building. "Poor old girl ran straight into my axe. Didn't even get to say hello-goodbye or nothin'. Bless her soul."

"What the hell is this?" Rochelle gasped in a thick voice that warned that she was on the verge of throwing up.

"God shall plant the seed and man shall devour the bounty," Croft replied. He grinned and the size of his pupils seemed to change, as if someone had shined a light into his eyes unexpectedly. The corner of his mouth ticked. "It's a plague, you know? It's the goddamn reckonin'."

My stomach felt like it had been filled with ice. I couldn't bring any sort of definitive emotion to the surface. My hands were numb and stood in fists at my sides, and I didn't know what to do with them.

Croft winked at Ellis. "Doubt the Lord'd mind much if I shared, what cause I'm lovin' my neighbor."

"No," Ellis rasped. "No, no, you ain't!"

"I don't hear this pretty young lady complainin' none, do you?" He sidled over close to the body and stroked her scabbed knee. The skin was discolored from infection and death. "Naw, she don't mind none."

Then Rochelle really was sick. She stumbled back, the hard right, and puked all over the pavement. The sharp, sour smell of it filled the air. I felt my mouth fill with bile.

"You know what I found," Croft continued. "What cause there are lots of other survivors, you know, immune and such. They hung some live ones up by their wrists n hair over by Eddy's Bakery, in the parkin lot. About six of em, and a boy, what cause some folks prefer it that way. They's still squirmin and everythin' if that's more your fancy. Right mess, really, though – I'd rather use my own, cold or whatever, don't matter much. Less of a chance of catchin' somethin'."

"Shut up," Ellis stammered. The corner of his mouth foamed from the effort it took not to vomit, too; he swiped his wrist across his mouth. His breath spiked and made his chest heave. "You shut yer dirty mouth. It ain't right. It ain't right. _It ain't right!_"

"Hey, man, ain't no time to be gettin' ornery. Pretty soon we may be the last two folks on earth, now, ain't it?" Croft slowly drew a grenade out of his pocket - a homemade thing that smelled of gasoline, and he put his thumb over the catch with a cool laziness that spoke levels about his insanity. "I don't mind causin' trouble. I got a spot in heaven."

I couldn't feel the motions, but the next thing I knew I had my shotgun leveled at his chest.

"Don't, now," Croft warned with a languid grin. He flexed the muscle of his thumb. "I don't mind blowin' us all straight up to God."

"Don't kill him, Nick," Ellis rasped. "Come on, please…"

"You saw, you saw what he did," I growled. Hot anger started to leak into my veins, and it was a good feeling, the first real emotion in a while. It filled me with pleasant heat. "I ought to blow his head from his shoulders."

"He's a nasty ol' dog, he's sick… But he's clean, there, look. There ain't much of us folk left, Nick," Ellis said. His voice was soft and low, and the tears were coming. "You hear me?"

"Shit," I muttered. "Shit."

"We can't keep losin' folks. What'll happen, if the only good folk who are left start shootin' each other? What's the point of us even fightin'?"

"I'm going to kill him," I said. "I'm going to kill him anyway."

Croft shifted a little, closing his other hand around the grenade now. He glanced between me and Ellis with pinprick eyes, and his grin seemed to squirm around on his face.

"_We already lost Coach_, Nick," Ellis said. "Come on. Come on, God, please. I can't stand no more of this. I can't take no more."

Mentioning Coach outright did it. It sucked the air out of me. I lowered my gun and I felt sick and cold again. Coach had been my fault, too.

"Fine. Fine."

"Thank you. Thank you. It ain't right, takin' someone's life away when they still got a life to be livin'."

I spat at Croft's feet, and he let out a shrill giggle. He put his grenade away and flicked his burnt-out cigarette at me, and something in me, something that had been thin and threadbare for a while now, snapped clean in two. I pounced on him and started laying in the punches, and Croft laughed and sputtered and finally started shrieking. Ellis tried to pull me off and then decided against it, watched with dull, tired eyes as I pummeled Croft into the cement.

"_Turnin' on your own kind, you sick bastard_!" Croft was yowling. I broke his noise and his teeth and the flesh started to give dangerously under my hand, and my knuckles were hurting and my arm was aching. My punches came slower and weaker and Croft gurgled drunkenly, oozing red onto the pavement. It felt good, felt so good.

"Get off of him," Rochelle said softly. She was pulling the skirt of the dead woman back down. "Come on, Nick. Let's walk."

I got up off of Croft. He lay there gibbering and bleeding, curled in on himself, moaning. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to watch his blood stain the air.

"He don't deserve no justice," Ellis whispered to me. It was all right.

Croft coughed and rolled over. He vomited blood onto the street, a stringy, watery mess.

"I don't need more blood on my hands," I said, and I started walking. Ellis kept on me, his body heat comforting in a way.

Rochelle murmured a prayer, and her voice echoed from a million silent rooftops, like a million angels in answer.

We turned the corner and the stranger was gone from sight. He had lit another cigarette and was starting in on his Cheez-Its again, but his pants were zipped, and his nose bled thin ribbons of red onto his shirt.

I had enough blood on my hands, enough.

-- **the end**


End file.
